Got Learning?
Welcome to Tuesday morning's Morning Feature Featurette, Things We Learned This Week. TWLTW is a hosted commentary and discussion that focuses on anything its participants learned in the past week.
So, if you learned anything in the past week, you're exactly the person we've been looking for. (And boy are we glad we found you!) And if you think you haven't, as unlikely as that is, read along and we will dispel that myth once and for all...
For starters, Ol' Professor Crackpot has been noticing a lot of scuttlebutt in the BPI student center this week about how fast or slow or fast-then-slow the Obama administration has been moving on issues of importance like equal rights, health care, and foreign relations. But he would remind these students that speed is only part of a vector. Direction counts for something, too...
Updated: The Frontline website for the Obama's War documentary I report on at the end of the diary (and that was advertised here a few days ago) has put up 24 minutes of their footage on their website. While it may have been jarring to see the wraparound skin thing, the doc looks more than worth a little time. I'm confident we'll be seeing diaries about it most of the day tomorrow, in fact...
Robert J. Sternberg
Professor Sternberg is one of the most influential research psychologists and psychometricians alive today. His theories on intelligence, creativity, and leadership are some of the most cited and discussed ideas on human mental functioning ever written. However, unlike Freud, Jung, May, and others, his theories are firmly rooted in the cognitive functions of the mind, not the unconscious or affective (emotional). Most of the ideas in this diary come from the Sternberg chapter in a book titledCreativity and Development.
The Investment Theory of Creativity
Sternberg's Investment Theory is that creative people "buy low" and "sell high" in the marketplace of ideas. What this means, analogically speaking, is that people who are creative are not afraid of, or daunted by, or inhibited in considering and pursuing ideas that the majority of people choose to not bother with. The buy low because they go after ideas that are cheap- cheap because very few people are interested in them. Then, when the idea bears fruit or attracts widespread attention they abandon it and move on to something else.
There are many, many examples, but one classic is Nicola Tesla. Famous for hardly even writing anything down, he never bothered to enforce his patents for inventing the radio (Marconitook Tesla's ideas and patented them, thus, Marconi "invented" the radio) and many other inventions because he had moved on to not only the next idea, but the 3rd, 4th, and 5th next ideas.
The Investment Theory is a confluence theory, meaning that it takes into consideration and allows for both the individual creative person as well as the field (gatekeepers) and domain (symbol system, like "science" or "art") with which they work.
The Propulsion Theory of Creativity
This one differs from the Investment Theory by refocusing away from the individual and onto the domain. The main idea is that all creative people are leaders. Creative people buy into the unpopular ideas that then later become popular, or influential, or otherwise considered creative and that by doing so, lead the domain to a new place it would not have arrived at without them. He argues there are 8 forms this movement (speed and direction/vector) can take (yes, it would not be a Caractacus diary without a numbered list or two!):
- Replication--creatives bring the movement of the field back to itself, confirming it is in the right place and on the right track. In science, this is a reliability test, running an experiment again in a creatively different way to see if the results from an earlier test are confirmed. In politics, this would be leaders wandering around looking for a way to get "their" America back. (And, yes, I do consider hosting am radio shows to be a case of "wandering around" in this context!)
- Redefinition--the domain does not change, but our understanding of where it is and what it means changes because of the creative work of the leader. Heard anybody telling you and others that this really is a center-right nation, despite opinion polls and elections that indicate otherwise? Or, how 'bout that one about Obama being a commie-fascist-Kenyan-dictator? I would also put the Swiftboaters in this category as well. All are creative attempts to redefine a domain (Obama) by leaving it basically where it is and instead of changing it, changing the people's understanding/opinion of it.
- Forward Incrementation--Sternberg calls this one, "moving the field forward but in an expected, nonstartling way." In other words, we're going down the field 3 yards at a time, with safe short rushes, rather than throwing the ball long and aiming for a big change. This is the one where a lot of people I know (I'm still on the fence on this one, not enough information for me to decide yet) feel the entire Obama administration is stuck. They voted for big change, and they feel they're getting forward incrementation instead.
- Advanced Forward Incrementation--This is that big change, long ball, Howard Dean-50-state-strategy stuff. Moving the field in the direction it was already moving, but going for 15 to 40 yards instead of 3.
- Redirection--Don't like where your field is going? Lead it in a new direction. Literally. Close Guantanamo Bay, for example. Declare no torture policies, and no black-prison policies. Restrict your use of signing statements. Redirection is difficult work in this theory because the masses like inertia. The leader who risks redirection risks being rejected by the people subject to the creative leadership.
- Reconstruction/Redirection--The leader takes the field back to an earlier time and from that point takes a different path from the one originally taken. Picasso studied African masks for years before painting his first cubist face, for example. West Side Story was based on Romeo & Juliet, but taken in a different direction than Hamlet's original in terms of staging, setting, and cast.
- Reinitiation--The leader calls for a complete paradigm shift. In this one, basic assumptions are challenged and reformed anew to match new circumstances or to more accurately align with preexisting ones. Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences is an example of reinitiation of the study of intelligence as it was a complete "reboot" of the traditionally static, unidimensional theories that came before it. (While Thurstone and others had pointed the way to breaking the assumptions set of g, Gardner was the first to place the origins of each intelligence in different functional areas of the brain.) I would dare say that Mr. Grayson has upended the past 3 months in the past 7 days with a complete reinitiation of Democratic rhetoric on the health care reform effort. Unfortunately for him, and for us, leaders in this category are most likely to be rejected or ignored because the paradigm shifting and assumption challenging creativity involved is simply too much for the masses to absorb. This is one reason why Forward Incrementation is so much more easily found in politics, science, and art.
- Integration--ala Sternberg, "does not accept or reject an existing paradigm; it merges together two paradigms that previously were seen as unrelated or even as opposed." Sound like bipartisanship, anyone? Now, for a long time, I have assumed that the pursuit of bipartisanship on Obama's part would have at least as a collateral fallout the improvement of engagement between the two parties. It seems, however, that the exact opposite has happened, and that the merging of the two paradigms runs the risk of not being fair or balanced. This is where we could insert observations about Republicans only definition of compromise being when Democrats either give in or give up. Trying to force an integration with even inspired creative leadership under such conditions may work. But it also may not work. And then, to which of the other 7 models do you turn?
There's Creativity and Then There's Creativity
Modern theories of creativity are not bound by individual narratives of the hyper-creative artist or author. "What made Einstein Einstein?" is not a question modern theorists of creativity are as likely to ask as "What about Einstein and his early access to the domains of math and science, his internal thinking style(s), and the environments in which he lived and worked explains his emergence as a scientifically creative person?" He changed the domain in a clear statement of reinitiation creative leadership. Relativity forced all members of that domain (the field) to change their assumptions about the basics of their inquiries. So, while creativity does still involve novelty (thinking of something no one else has thought of, originality), fluency (having more ideas than other people), and flexibility (more kinds of ideas than others), what one does with that, how that activity is accepted or rejected by their peers over time (as in Van Gogh not making any significant sales of his canvases until, well, after his death does not make him less creative just because his wider acceptance took longer than say, Thomas Kincade), and the social-economic-and-environmental variables under which the work takes place are just as important considerations as the traditional notions of creativity.
Submitted for class discussion and debate:
Which of the 8 Propulsion models is the Obama administration currently using to creatively lead on the following political issues?
- Don't Ask Don't Tell
- Health Care Reform
- Afghanistan Strategy
- Iran & Nuclear Weapons
- Relationship with Crazy-Like-A-Fox News
- Party unity in the Senate
- Feel free to insert your own...I'm very interested in what you think!
TWLTW
While it would seem that with family in town there wasn't much time to learn new things, a few items did penetrate the barrier between Professor Potts and the outside world:
- Calculating the binomial probability distribution for 2 random variables. At least, I think I learned it. Maybe I just copied it...
- There is such a thing as "semantic satiation," which means that feeling you get when you think so long and hard about something that it completely loses meaning for you and you have to take a break.
- Both Mark Twain and Sid Vicious lived in the Chelsea Hotel, though not at the same time!
- Washington Square Park is at 5th Ave and 14th St, and that I can find my way around the city in my car better than I thought I could!
- Gala apples are divine, but Honey Crisps still rule the orchard.
- Family can drive you nuts, so it's a good thing I like nuts.
- Driving my own Ol' Crackpot back from Penn Station this morning, I heard an early report on that Obama's War documentary that was advertised here to such wild success a few days ago. I strongly encourage everyone to give it a chance based on the report I just heard. It really sounds worth the time. I'll report more on why in the comments.